Publishing from a digital dissertation

This query came from a member of the ANS Advisory Board! Please comment and share you opinions, and if you have policies for your journal related to this, let us know!

Our university is coming into the 20^th century with a soon to be made decision to digitalize dissertation submissions and records. We have a choice between digital commons and ProQuest. While there are pros and cons to each my question is in regard to ANS and the digital commons. If the dissertation is placed on digital commons will ANS view this as a publication and thus the material will not be considered for publication in ANS? Has this been discussed at the editor’s group? I appreciate your input.

4 responses to “Publishing from a digital dissertation”

peggychinn

March 24, 2011

From Judith Baggs (posted on the INANE email list, 3-22-2011)

I don’t know about the difference between the two venues. The publisher has a major voice here I believe. I checked with Wiley Blackwell about publishing articles from previously posted dissertations with chapters designed to be published manuscripts and about posting dissertations when a chapter or two had already been published in a WB journal. They are OK with both.

[My editorial in the] April issue of Research in Nursing & Health [is on this topic]. I am hoping that the topic will surface, hopefully several times, in San Francisco at INANE.

Judith Gedney Baggs, PhD, RN, FAAN
Editor, Research in Nursing & Health
Oregon Health & Science Univrsity
3455 SW US Veterans Hospital Road, SN-4S
Portland, OR 97239
503-494-1017

Thomas Lawrence Long

March 24, 2011

This issue is under discussion by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Digital commons systems are typically open access and hosted by the home university, so some journals view this as a form of competing publication and are hesitant to consider for journal publication mss that are currently available in an open access database. (Never mind that a journal provides considerable value added as a result of peer review and revision.) ProQuest and its kin are accessible only to subscribers (e.g. institutional subscribers) so are less likely to be viewed as competing publication. The matter may be further complicated with dissertations in the format of several articles (rather than the traditional monograph dissertation).

Thomas Lawrence Long

April 9, 2011

In the April 3, 2011 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, see Jennifer Howard’s article “The road from dissertation to book has a new pothole: The internet,” which summarizes the current ambivalence about open access publication of dissertations: “Libraries’ digital open-access rules make some editors wary of buying graduate students’ work, although others see a marketing boost.”

mary

September 23, 2011

I checked with GRIN publishing http://www.grin.com to ask them if it is still possible to have parts of a dissertation published in a professional journal and having it also published with them as a book with an ISBN. They don’t mind at all – they do even welcome this. They kindly ask for a reference (e.g. publisher and ISBN) at the end of the article, but it is not mandatory. They also offer on the other hand to reference one’s articles. I guess it is a kind of a win-win situation to reference each other.

INANE – International Academy of Nursing Editors